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This week I was in Madrid to work together with XPLANE, the leading company when it comes to visual thinking in strategy & business. XPLANE will help me with the visuals for some examples and processes in my upcoming book on business model innovation.

Together with Pablo Ramirez of XPLANE we worked on several things, including the business model of the Apple iPod. Here is a first sketch - open for your input & feedback...

Don't hesitate with comments & feedback. This is most certainly one of the examples we will use in the book. At every workshop & event I do, the Apple iPod comes up because of its influence on the music industry.

I've always been an admirer of the work of XPLANE, the visual thinking company, and its founder Dave Gray. So I'm quite excited to announce that we are now collaborating on visualizing business models. I will speak about the topic at a workshop organized by XPLANE on September 30th in London. The overall theme is "Thinking Visually to Tackle Business Challenges"(flyer).

Find the first XPLANE sketch of how a visualized business model could look like on slideshare:

The XPLANE workshop in London promises to be very interesting. They will apply a creative and innovative approach to problem solving with participants. Personally, I am a firm believer in visual thinking and apply it in all my work. If you want to start learning about this I think the XPLANE event is a good place to start. Workshop goals are:

Understand the meaning and value of visual thinking

Use a creative and innovative method to solve business challenges

Use visual tools to help you generate, evaluate and organise ideas

Learn how to use them to contextualise, prioritise and harness change

Extend these new techniques and methodology to your team

Find out more about the event in their flyer and if you're interested subscribe on eventbrite.

On XPLANE's website you can also find a multitude of examples of their work. Below just one case study (pdf) that illustrates what they do:

I'm a strong proponent of using visual techniques and tools in business communications. This starts with sound Power Point Presentations and culminates in the clear and visual communication of corporate strategies (including business models). Therefore I'm a big fan of XPLANE, the global market leader in visual thinking and visual techniques that helps companies solve business problems and improve business communications through visuals. They've worked with a large number of global companies, including Credit Suisse, Nokia, Apple, IBM, Bank of America and many more.

I've talked to XPLANE's Founder and CEO, Dave Gray, about using visual techniques in business in today's podcast. We also talked about the workshop Dave will be giving at our premises at Arvetica in Geneva, Switzerland, on the 18th of March (there are still a few seats available, if you are interested).

Enjoy the podcast:

In the podcast Dave explains the value of visual techniques for businesses and private banks and outlines what we will be doing during the workshop in March. He particularly stresses that mediocre communications lead to misalignment in management and hence result in poor implementation. Dave invites entire management and project teams to participate in the workshop so that they can directly work on concrete business problems. That's quite an opportunity to be able to benefit from individual coaching by one of the leading thinkers in visual business communications.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop download the flyer (pdf) and send us the registration form.

The last few days I have been thinking of the value of visual tools in strategy quite intensly. When I was standing in front of our business strategy library I realized how few of these books use visual techniques to make things clearer. Often there is not much more than charts and quite a number of strategy books are text only. The topic of visual techniques and communication has been on my mind because we are currently in close contact with XPLANE, a company whose tagline is "the visual thinking company". They help businesses communicate complex business issues with simple images. One thing I realized was how XPLANE and Arvetica each create value through visual techniques in different areas with different tools.

Arvetica: Our main strength is to synthesise the essence of business issues, such as strategies and business models in simple diagrams. These are based on concepts (e.g. strategy maps) and are mainly composed of boxes and arrows. The value lies in creating a rapid understanding and the highlighting of how issues are related to each other. Images communicate relationships between objects than text documents. How can you quickly and clearly describe an interdependant multi-channel market approach with words?

XPLANE: Their main strength is their ability to illustrate complex business issues (e.g. change management) with drawn scenarios. They create a quick understanding with their comic-like pictures, because humans easily relate to stories. In many cases it is not sufficient to illustrate business issues through boxes and arrows only. Human scenarios that describe business issues in an illustrative manner help people relate to a the topic much easier. For example, the above image illustrates how to deal with difficult clients.

I'm quite exited that I will be able to learn more about visual techniques in business from XPLANE. I firmly believe that this will be one of the hot topics in strategic management in the coming years. In business strategy we still poorly communicate when it comes to visuals...

At the LIFT'07 conference I had the great pleasure to talk to XPLANE founder and CEO Dave Gray. He has built a wonderful company over the years and he follows the same mantra as we do at Arvetica: visual language can help communicate complex issues such as, for example, business strategy or change management.

I very much admire Dave for being able to write a blog, educate interested people on visualization (here, here and here) and still stay an artist... I very much look forward to doing some joint work with Dave and his company.